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Bayesian Diagnostic Reasoning
Bayesian diagnostic reasoning is the clinical application of Bayes' theorem: the probability of a diagnosis given a test result depends not just on the test's accuracy but on the prior probability (pre-test probability)…
Bayesian Updating
Bayesian updating revises probabilities by combining priors with likelihoods for observed evidence and normalizing across hypotheses
BCG Matrix (Growth-Share Matrix)
Boston Consulting Group's portfolio analysis tool that classifies business units by market growth rate and relative market share into four quadrants: Stars (high growth, high share), Cash Cows (low growth, high share), Q…
Be a hyperrealist.
Dalio's hyperrealism combines ambition with evidence-responsive assessment of current conditions, constraints, and possibilities
Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.
Ray Dalio’s paired principles encourage serious consideration of contrary views and visibility into relevant reasoning and information
Beachhead
Military strategy adapted to business: establish a small, defensible foothold in a new market before expanding
Beat Reporting Knowledge Accumulation (The Specialist Advantage)
Beat reporting assigns a reporter to a specific subject area for an extended period, building deep expertise, source networks, and pattern recognition
Beer Distribution Game (Bullwhip Effect)
Jay Forrester and Peter Senge's simulation game demonstrating the bullwhip effect: in a supply chain, small fluctuations in consumer demand produce increasingly amplified oscillations as you move upstream—retailers order…
Before/during/after mapping
Write down the timeline you already have, in three slots: what happens ahead of the key event, what happens inside it, and what follows. This is the baseline picture, taken as-is, before you change anything about the order.
Beginner's Mind (Shoshin)
Shoshin is an orientation of openness in Zen practice, articulated by Shunryu Suzuki as meeting activity without a closed self-image of expertise
Behavior Change Communication Ladder
The behavior change communication ladder maps stages from awareness to sustained change: Awareness (learning behavior exists), Knowledge (understanding why it matters), Attitude (developing favorable feelings), Intention…
Behavior Change Wheel (Michie)
Susan Michie's Behavior Change Wheel (BCW) synthesizes 19 frameworks into one unified model
Behavior or process observation
Watch what people actually do or how the process actually runs, instead of relying on reports about it.
Behavioral Finance Personal Application
Key biases in personal finance: loss aversion (losses feel 2x worse, leading to holding losers and selling winners), overconfidence (most investors believe they're above average, leading to excess trading), recency bias…
Behavioral Models-Model
Behavioral models formalize specific decision processes or preferences, such as reference dependence, present bias, or inequality concerns, and test their implications.
Belief
The confidence you actually carry in your head after the reasoning is done, stated as a degree rather than a fact. Ask whether that confidence matches what the inference supports, or whether it hardened on the way in.
Belief and decision update
Record how your belief and your action changed from before to after, plus what uncertainty remains.
Belief update
State how the new evidence moved your confidence in each candidate story, with rough before and after numbers. This line scores the world, not your plan or your next step. If nothing moved, write that plainly.
Believability-Weighted Decision Making
Ray Dalio’s method for giving more influence to judgments from people with relevant demonstrated competence and explainable reasoning
Believe First and Doubt Later
Daniel Gilbert's research showing that the brain's DEFAULT response to new claims is to BELIEVE them—and that disbelief requires a SECOND, effortful cognitive step
bell curve
The smooth, idealised version of a hump-shaped histogram, drawn so that a distribution can be summarised by two numbers: where the middle is and how wide the spread is. It is a model laid over data, not the data, which makes it clean to reason with and dangerous when the real set is lopsided, has two humps, or has a tail that never thins out.
Bell Curve/Normal Distribution
The normal distribution is a symmetric bell-shaped continuous distribution specified by a mean and standard deviation
Benchmark, matched case, or contrast pair
Compare similar cases that differ in one meaningful way to see what that difference does.